Pete Wentz Is An Abuser. Lets Talk About It.

Pete Wentz is an Abuser. Let’s Talk About It.

tw abuse, rape, pedophilia, intimate partner violence, rape culture

I’m nervous to write this post. In order to write it, I have to talk about a lot of things that scare me and a lot of things that make me feel empty and powerless and angry. Plus, there are a lot of awesome people writing awesome things about this topic and I don’t have much to add to the conversation as a whole except my own individual perspective as a kid who loved Fall Out Boy more than she loved herself. So that’s what I have to offer you today: a hopefully-coherent series of thoughts about the ways in which Fall Out Boy perpetuate serious harm.

If you scroll down  bit, you’ll be reminded that my last post was about the ways Fall Out Boy shaped my understanding of my own identity and personhood. I spent a lot of my adolescence feeling very protective of FOB and the other bands I considered part of my identity, and I think a lot of other people do this too. The whole “Band as Self” thing was a huge part of who i was, and it’s impossible to separate that from who I am today. I would never try to take that history away from anyone because I cannot take it away from myself. I probably have Fall Out Boy lyrics etched into my bones the way they’re etched into the rubber of my Vans at the back of my closet, or something overdramatic like that. I have a Fall Out Boy tattoo, for crying out loud. But I have to own that along with all of the things that come with it.

One of those things is this: Pete Wentz is a statutory rapist. This is an undisputed fact. When Pete Wentz was 23, he was dating a 15-year-old girl. His relationship with her was the inspiration for Take This To Your Grave, the soundtrack to revenge porn before “revenge porn” was a thing. Pete Wentz is an abuser, and he and his bandmates and everyone else involved in the functioning of Fall Out Boy is directly profiting off of the exploitation of a child.

I’m not going to include too many links in this post because the facts are easy enough to find thanks to Google, and I don’t particularly want to contribute to the constant name-dropping this woman has been subjected to for the last eleven or twelve years. The information is everywhere. Even as a kid, I knew the story of the woman who had inspired such poetic lyrics as Let’s play this game/called when you catch fire/I wouldn’t piss to put you out and With every breath I wish your body would be broken again, among many others. Pretty much every song on the album, and many songs on future albums as well, are about killing her or at very least wishing that she’d crash her car and die.

This, of course, is not something I picked up on immediately. In fact, it took me an embarrassingly long time to look critically at Fall Out Boy. It began in 2013, over six years after I first began listening to the band in earnest. I was twenty years old and though I’d long since stopped subscribing to Alternative Press, I bought the September issue because the cover story was a piece commemorating the tenth anniversary of Take This to Your Grave, FOB’s first official album. It was billed as an oral history and a tribute to the album, and I was feeling the weight of my own mortality as the end of college drew nearer. Fall Out Boy was still one of the most important things to me, and I was beginning to explore my interest in oral history and music history as a whole, so I eagerly sought out the magazine and sat in a Target Starbucks to read it.

The article addressed the band’s history up until the release of TTYG and got into some detail about the studio where the album was recorded, but for the first time in my life i noticed the silence around the meaning of the songs. Growing up, I mostly heard TTYG explained as a breakup album detailing Pete Wentz’s heartbreak after his girlfriend cheated on him, and somehow this was enough reason for 12 songs about wishing her dead. As obvious as it sounds, it took reading this article and feeling nauseated by all of the men praising the album to make me realize that I have to detangle my emotional attachment to Fall Out Boy from the reality that Pete Wentz is a rapist and everything Fall Out Boy has ever made is predicated on that fact. It took me another few months to start compiling information and developing enough of a framework around community accountability to have a fully-fleshed-out opinion on the subject, and it took experiencing an emotionally abusive relationship to get angry enough to finally make some decisions about how to progress in my communities.

The conclusion I came to begins like this: if you take away all of our connections to this band, if we detach our meanings and put them aside for a moment, the case of Pete Wentz the Rapist is unavoidably made. As stated, he dated a fifteen-year-old when he was twenty-three. He frequently refers to himself as Peter Pan and has at least one tattoo to that effect. As far back as 2007, people have been writing absolutely fucking mind-boggling articles about Pete Wentz/FOB that all but name him as an abusive partner (and refer to his ex-girlfriend as his “sulky teenage muse”—remember that Pete was twenty-seven in 2007). The cops had to come because he was breaking the windows of her car.

These are all things we were familiar with back then. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I knew the facts, and so did most of my friends. The thing is, we didn’t really care. We would have followed Fall Out Boy anywhere. Here’s the thing, though: it wasn’t our responsibility to disown Pete Wentz. It was someone’s responsibility to protect us from him, and whoever was supposed to do that job failed, simply and utterly. But whose job was it to do that? Here’s the answer: his bandmates, who have yet to denounce or even mention his behavior; his friends and managers and publicists, who should have known better; and the music community at large, a community which (like most other business endeavors) profits off of the exploitation of teenage girls. Fall Out Boy made millions and millions of dollars off of Pete Wentz’s marketability to teenage girls. Panic! At the Disco, Paramore, and tons of other bands made millions and millions of dollars off of Pete Wentz’s marketability to teenage girls. And this marketability is the result of the qualities that made him a textbook statutory rapist and certified man-baby. That’s the shit we’re selling girls.

In my opinion, the people who have the biggest responsibility to speak up, other than Patrick Stump, Andy Hurley, and Joe Trohman, are other pop punk musicians who have profited off of the Pete Wentz model of stardom. Luckily enough, there is already a blueprint for them thanks to New Found Glory. Allow me to direct your ears toward the band’s most recent album, Resurrection, released in the wake of former guitarist Steve Klein’s trial for lewd conduct with a minor. As this shitstain of a review explains, though Steve Klein continues to deny the allegations, his former bandmates have released an album eviscerating him to power chords, calling him out and describing why, exactly, they cut him off. This ridiculous fucking review, in true Alternative Press fashion, attempts to defend Klein by accusing NFG of “kicking someone when he’s down,” otherwise known as “speaking publicly against pedophilia, which is a good thing to do unless the pedophile is in your band, in which case you should shut the fuck up.” This isn’t a perfect solution or even a solution at all, really, but it is a movement toward public, unapologetic accountability among some of the most iconic pop punk bros. 

Listen: I’m twenty-two. I don’t have any answers, just a whole lot of sadness and a mountain of guilt about the way I was taught to vilify other girls for the benefit of older men thanks to the culture of pop punk. In a lot of ways, this right here is why i decided to start this blog: pop punk is not safe for kids like me, was never safe for kids like me, and particularly for kids who are oppressed along axes I am not. We are sold to, and welcomed in theory—until we show up to shows or listen too closely to lyrics, at which point we are constantly bombarded and harangued and leered at.  

So here’s my personal solution, as it currently stands: I will never buy another Fall Out Boy concert ticket. I will never buy another Fall Out Boy t-shirt. I can’t escape my history with this music, but i can refuse to contribute to a culture that celebrates and protects men who abuse young girls. I can’t fight every battle—hell, I can’t boycott every abuser because there are simply too many and no one can know all of them—but I can do this, and you can do something similar. Let’s talk about Pete Wentz as the abuser he is. Let’s make his people face what he’s done. It’s one small way we can protect the kids we once were.

This piece isn’t exactly what I want it to be, and I’m going to keep thinking and talking and writing it out. I want to talk to you about it. I want to learn more. I want to develop these ideas into something mobilized, maybe; mobilized toward what, I’m not sure yet. But if you have ideas, or questions, or a hurt you wanna share, please reach out.

Finally, a huge thank you to witchsong for this piece, which is an excellent response to a pro-FOB piece published on their site in the wake of this issue.

Trigger warning: Suicide

Ok guys, I know you’ve all seen like a million of these tumblr posts but

Please

Please

Please

Like and reblog this post as much as possible.

My friend is contemplating suicide and we’ve agreed that for every note this gets, she lives another day.

So please, please like, reblog and comment on this post

I don’t know what I’d do without her

Please help a queer black woman leave an abusive household

TW: Abuse, Rape mention and mention of cancer and homophobia/queerphobia

Hi everyone, I am a queer black woman, my name is Chelsea and I desperately need $3500 to help move out of an abusive household.

Throughout my life I have been living with my narcissistic parents who are frequently abusive (both emotionally, physically and homophobic/queerphobic) and it has taken a toll on my mental well-being as I've been diagnosed with chronic anxiety and undiagnosed adhd. My parents continue to speak negatively to me and they have a tendency of using personal hardships that I have been through to belittle me. In 2018 I was raped by someone I knew in highschool. That incident made me ill and I had to be treated for vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia which is a precancerous skin condition. Both my parents use this incident to gaslight, belittle and manipulate me. They also constantly speak down on the queer community and say hateful things, which suggests that they would be physically violent towards any queer people. They are unaware of my sexual orientation and I've been hiding that from them to keep myself safe.

They do not allow me to leave the house unless I am accompanied by someone. I have been trying to look for work so I can become financially independent, but they physically stop me from going to job interviews. I do not know how many more years I can go on being trapped like this.

I’m raising money so I can move out and afford a one-bedroom apartment and start healing in a safer environment and to gain financial independence. I will need funds for transport to move, and for a couple of months groceries and rent as well as funds to get a new ID and passport, my parents keep them from me. I’m hoping to be able to move to another city because my rapist lives in the same neighbourhood and city as me, so not only am I not safe when I am at home, I'm also constantly paranoid during the few occasions that I'm allowed to go out. Please please help if you can!

I will be extremely grateful to anyone that donates any amount at all. If you can't donate may you please share it and hopefully reach someone that can.

I have a PayPal account which is currently the only place I can accept donations:

PayPal.Me

Pay Chelsea Summer using PayPal.Me

Go to paypal.me/chelseanovasummer and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.

Hey everyone, I wasn't planning on coming out on here...... probably ever, as being stealth is what's most comfortable for me, but I'm in seriously deep shit, and with the government passing a law last year that made legal/medical transition impossible and one today that basically made all lgbt content illegal, I realised I can't delay getting top surgery and moving away anymore.

With the help of an american friend, I set up a gofundme for my top surgery where I elaborate a bit on what's been going on with me, I'd really appreciate any support or even just a reblog, this really means the world to me, thank you & I love you all

gofundme.com

Hungarian top surgery fund, organized by Zoë Shreckengost

Hi guys, my name is Zoë, I am helping Chris by organising this for him, as you can’t use … Zoë Shreckengost needs your support for Hungaria